


A Beautiful Day for a Neighbor

by scioscribe



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Canon LGBTQ Character, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, Genderqueer Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 05:06:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/770303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He moved in next door to Jeff not because Jeff Winger was sexy even in a coffin and especially in aviators, Goth makeup, and a tango clutch, but because he had spent two months talking to the shadow of Jeff in his head and then Jeff had shown up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Beautiful Day for a Neighbor

**Author's Note:**

> I would very much prefer the Dean not be characterized as stalkerish, so have some motivation and friendship, everybody.
> 
> Canon nods present (like in the summary), with particular references to the end of S3 (the Dean's imprisonment)/beginning of S4 (moving in next to Jeff).

Craig’s apartment complex had put everything he owned into a storage unit and billed him for it when he came back. He marked down the first of the month to keep paying, since he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

He slept on his father’s couch for a week and then pretended it was the forty-five minute commute to Greendale every morning that made him start hotel-hopping, instead. Every room he stayed in, he turned the heat up until sweat broke out on his skin like a rash, and he started picking up people at night just so he didn’t have to be alone. Some of them were not-so-nice people; some of them were, but just not his type at all, but Craig was good at a lot of things in a lot of different ways, and he prided himself on them probably not _knowing_ that they were only there so he wouldn’t wake up shaking if the A/C kicked on in the middle of the night.

 

They had put everything in the storage unit, down to half a jar of peanut butter. When he came to swap out his clothes, he sat down on what had been his dresser and dug two fingers worth of peanut butter out of the jar, just to see if he could eat it without gagging. He couldn’t. It tasted like dust and Freon and two months of worrying about whether or not he’d get scurvy.

They had put the chocolate syrup with the kitchen things even though it hadn’t, to the best of his knowledge, been in the kitchen the last time he’d left his apartment. He wondered if that was consideration, confusion, or judgment.

Most of the clothes were intact, but there was a two inch tear in the sateen of one of the Southern belle numbers and blonde hair on his bee costume. He sent everything out for dry-cleaning with money he didn’t really have, not after months of no salary and months of cheap motels, but at least when they came back they looked like nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.

He switched from boxers to briefs. He still looked like something out of the ordinary had happened to him, though. He could tell he wasn’t himself, even if that wasn’t something most people could tell about him, apparently.

 

He started spending the night at Greendale, and when it was Academania, he danced until the noise and the lights shook all conscious thought out of his head. He waited until someone he was dancing with pressed a strip of paper to his tongue and then Craig said, “I was in the basement! For, like, two months! No one even knew I was gone!”

“Weird,” the guy said, and he licked Craig’s neck.

He had promised not to tell anyone, but people who were on acid and ear-bursting techno music were not people who would remember anything, but he realized, two minutes into a shouted confession at someone who kept dancing the whole time, that there was no way to tell the story anyhow. He’d been replaced like his life was so disposable that no one would know the difference, and for the longest time, no one had. Why wouldn’t he want to keep that a secret?

If he slept in his office, the noise from the rave kept him from feeling like he was alone. It was a temporary fix, but that was sort of the point of raves in the first place.

 

He moved in next door to Jeff not because Jeff Winger was sexy even in a coffin and especially in aviators, Goth makeup, and a tango clutch, but because he had spent two months talking to the shadow of Jeff in his head and then Jeff had shown up. Well, first Britta, but then Jeff. As far as security blankets went, Jeff was a workable, though prickly, substitute for the old didn’t-know-he-had-it-until-he-lost-it belief that he wouldn’t be replaced at some point by a lookalike. He could say: _Jeff would notice, if I were gone._

Of course, he still woke up shouting—that sounded better than screaming—every now and then.

 

So he started coming over with movies and wine and then he started coming over with movies and Scotch, to be accommodating to someone who was letting Craig sit on his couch until eleven-thirty most nights without asking for an explanation. Jeff had let Chang move into his apartment without anything more than a complaint, after all; he had to know that Craig was a better and more temporary houseguest. No hermit crabs in the sink, for one.

“We never saw the beginning of _Blade_ ,” Craig said.

“Maybe _you_ didn’t. Troy and Abed did biweekly screenings for a while.”

But it wasn’t a no—half of what Jeff said somehow straddled some fence between definitive statements—so Craig put it in and waited to see what would happen. As it turned out, what happened was they watched Blade, which turned out to have even more kickboxing vampire action than his previous viewing of it had suggested.

“Britta dated a guy named Blade once,” Jeff said. It had the feel of a peace offering. “He worked for a carnival.”

“Okay,” Craig said, “I don’t even know where to start with that.”

“You could ask her about it if you want all the gory details,” Jeff said. “Sometimes talking to Britta can be, you know, helpful,” and his eyes were fixated on the screen. He took another drink.

Sometimes trying to be Jeff Winger’s friend was like trying to learn a foreign language—well, at Greendale, with a Spanish teacher who didn’t speak any Spanish. 

 

He developed a taste for Scotch. Jeff developed a taste for wine coolers.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Jeff said, like that was the biggest secret Craig had ever had to keep. Sometimes self-centeredness was oddly soothing.

 

“You always dress like yourself at night,” Jeff said while they were watching _Casablanca_. His feet were on the coffee table and Craig wasn’t thinking about his ankles (much).

He said, “I _always_ dress as myself.”

It took him a minute to understand what Jeff meant, and all it did was remind him of when his father had told him that little boys didn’t play dress-up. Craig hadn’t known he was playing dress-up, he’d just thought he was dressing. And dressing to impress, when he did it, wasn’t dressing as someone else. He wasn’t Abed cosplaying as the Inspector or Jeff dressed as Ricky Nightshade.

“One time I dressed as a girl,” Jeff said. It was possible he’d had a little too much Scotch.

He wouldn’t have said he dressed as a girl, but obviously Jeff was thinking of something else, so he said, “You probably looked very pretty,” but somehow Jeff winced, like Craig had crossed some sort of line.

Craig wanted to say that he was the one who’d been held hostage in a basement for months, so if they were going to tiptoe through the minefield of anyone’s psyche, it should have been his. Instead, he took another handful of popcorn, leaned back, and ate it with his eyes closed. If he fell asleep on Jeff’s couch, there were fifty-fifty odds that Jeff would consider it too much work and too much emotional involvement to wake him up to tell him to leave.

He wasn’t surprised, then, when the air conditioning unit shuddered at eight in the morning and bolted him up. There was a blanket over him, but only partly over him, as if he’d kicked it or as if Jeff hadn’t been too committed to the gesture—both likely possibilities—and a note on the table underneath an empty coffee mug.

 _Went to class_ , it said. _Coffee is in the pot. Don’t go through my clothes._

_And no one cares what you dress like, FYI._

People did care, actually, most of the time, but he’d known Jeff Winger for four years now, and he understood that “no one” meant “Jeff at his most narcissistic, assuming his feelings represented the world’s,” and so he was a little touched.

He came over the next night in a denim skirt.

“Peasant blouses are out of style,” Jeff said. “When I said no one cared, I meant within the limits of reasonable fashion.”

“Confidence sells any fashion choice,” Craig said, and he was surprised to find that he was, in fact, confident. It had been so long it almost felt like he was standing inside a different skin. He’d dressed as himself: whoever said fashion wasn’t important? And for the first time, it came to him that he hadn’t had anything to wear when he’d been in the basement. Of all the tragedies, that was certainly one: Craig looked _good_ in the right clothes.

 

He started coming over to Jeff’s only one night a week.

Sometimes Jeff criticized his fashion choices and sometimes he said things like, “Yeah, because accentuating neutrals with bright blue _really_ brings out your eyes,” in a way where Craig couldn’t tell whether or not he was being sarcastic.

He forgot that the wall between his bedroom and Jeff’s living room was thin enough that he could sometimes hear Jeff’s TV. Anyway, increasingly, he wasn’t alone in his bedroom anymore: City College ran a surprisingly _interesting_ ROTC program with no ethical complications attached to Craig’s appreciation of the instructor’s interest in uniforms and the rescue of wounded soldiers.

He was headed in to get ready for Mark one night when Jeff, taking trash out into the hall, said, “Friendly reminder from your nonjudgmental neighbors that walls are thin and some people’s boyfriends are noisy. Also, I bought all those wine coolers from when you were over here half the time and now everyone in the group thinks Annie’s moved in.”

“Well, Jeffrey, I’m sure your problems are very difficult to deal with.”

Jeff raised his eyebrows. “Someone’s got his mojo workin’. Good to see you’re feeling better.” He clung the trash-bag into the chute, cleared his throat, and said to the hallway light above Craig’s shoulder: “You talked to Britta, right? I mean, don’t tell her I said it, but she’s not going to be the world’s worst therapist.”

Craig paused, his hand on his doorknob, and put a few things together.

Thin walls, the times he’d woken up yelling, Jeff’s unusual almost-niceness.

He had talked to Jeff, actually, but Jeff didn’t seem to want to believe he’d offered anything besides wine coolers and a TV, so he said, “Sometimes it’s the people you least expect,” and went inside.


End file.
